The career traveler: Jeff Greenwald shares his stories from the road

Oakland resident Jeff Greenwald has set foot in over 90 countries, give or take. Greenwald, a self-described “career traveler,” says that traveling for him is much more than just tourism. It’s an immersion – a full-body experience of the senses – and a responsibility. Greenwald has written six books about his experiences, and the latest is called Snake Lake – a reflection of his time in what he calls his second home: Kathmandu, Nepal. And from time to time Jeff also tells his tales on the stage, in a show called “Strange Travel Suggestions.” Greenwald joined KALW’s Hana Baba to share some of his favorite travel stories.

*     *     *

JEFF GREENWALD (reading from Snake Lake): “There are always drums beating from some place, tablas and horns and bicycle bells, the grating scream of ravens, arguments and laughter. Yet, somehow, Kathmandu is also the quietest place I’ve been. Between every sound was a beat of pure silence, so pure that the temples and pedestrians seemed like brilliant, abstract stitchings on a sheet of air.

I’d never expected it to be so cinematic. Every sight, large or small, was a flawless frame in a motion picture. A sacred cow posed in a carved, wooden doorway. Three school girls in bright purple uniforms. A street stall selling pistachios and masks.

It was like no place I’d ever been, no place I’d even imagined. Yet it was so familiar that on my very first afternoon in Nepal, I sat on a cane chair in the garden of a Kathmandu guest house, opened a package of soggy, arrowroot biscuits, and surrounded by flowers and a grinning, plaster Buddha, wrote down the words I’d waited all my life to write. ‘Welcome home.’”

HANA BABA: Your first trip to Kathmandu was in 1979.

JEFF GREENWALD: That’s right.

BABA: And it’s interesting, it was for love – a love that didn’t pan out, but you still went!

GREENWALD: That’s right, the woman was a great catalyst in my life. I mean, I would never have discovered Nepal if I hadn’t met this woman in Greece and then quite shamelessly followed her to Kathmandu.

BABA: So you met in Greece? Who was she?

GREENWALD: We met in Greece. Her name was Wendy, she had just graduated from medical school and she was going to Nepal to study ayurvedic medicine. We fell in love in Greece and I worked in Greece for three months to earn enough oney to meet her there. And when I got to Nepal, I just realized immediately that this was a place that would be my spiritual home, and that even though I didn’t know anything about past my lives or believe anything about it, I understood that I had a connection with this place that was undeniable. And that feeling has never left me in the 32 years since that first visit.

I was a journalist in Nepal in 1990. I was reporting for the San Francisco Examiner at the time. And as a reporter, as a journalist, my role was really to be objective, to observe, to try to let people in the rest of the world, specifically the Bay Area, know what was going on there, the roots of the tension. A lot of people in the Bay Area have a connection with Asia, and they were very interested to know what was happening in Nepal. And of course that was the roots of a people-power revolution that was successful. There’s just a word of mouth society where there had been almost no telephones, people in remote hill villages always communicating by word of mouth ... how did the word finally get out that there was to be a mass rally in the central part of Kathmandu?

Well, the way it happened or the way that I was told it happened by word of mouth, was that at one point, the king wanted to know what was going on in one of the outlying villages not far from Kathmandu, so sent one of his generals and a few of his army personnel up there with video cameras to film what was going on. But there’s no word for filming, there’s no verb in the Nepali language for filming. They use the same word that we do, and the word spread around Kathmandu that the army had been “shooting” the protestors from a helicopter. Of course they were shooting videos, but as this word of mouth spread, people became completely incensed and a couple of days laters, hundreds of thousands of people spilled out onto the streets.

A day later, the king abdicated and decided that he would be a constitutional monarch and the democracy protestors were victorious, all because of this misunderstanding of the language...

I moved to California when I was 19, I’m 56 now and this is my home. I love it here. My favorite place in the world is Point Reyes, I love the Bay Area – the deserts and the mountains, all the parts of California. But Nepal is a different kind of home for me. It’s a spiritual home, it’s a place where every year I try to return there and recharge my batteries in that way and surround myself by people who have a whole different way of understanding the world and put the other life I live for the other 11 months into perspective that stays with me.

BABA: You share your travel stories through publication, through your books. But also through theater...

GREENWALD (performing “Strange Travel Suggestions”): “The entire book fell from front to back, complaint after complaint after complaint...

BABA: You are in Calcutta, India, at the airport. You’ve just arrived, and you’re lugging a huge bag that you need to check in to this service called “Left Luggage” so you can kind of go and come back to it. The road to this building with the Left Luggage service is horrible to walk, and you get there and immediately ask the clerk where you can file a complaint about the road. He gives you this huge book where people over the years have made the very same complaint...

GREENWALD (performing “Strange Travel Suggestions”): “‘Fix the road! The goddamn road!’ One person simply wrote, ‘F*** you!’ in huge letters across the page. But I’m looking at this book, and I’ve got the pen in my hand, and I’m looking at this guy and he’s looking at me, and I say, “Sir, this book is 40-years-old. People have been complaining about the exact same thing for 40 years. What’s the point? What’s the point of this book?

And the man looks at me with the calmest expression on his face and he says, “Yes, please. You make a note of it.”

“Career traveler” Jeff Greenwald’s one-man show “Strange Travel Suggestions” is playing July 29 - August 27 at the Marsh Theater in Berkeley.

This story originally aired on February 22, 2011.